SJ2B House Of Books: March 2018

Tuesday, 20 March 2018

TEASER TUESDAY: I Stop Somewhere by T.E. Carter

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by

The Purple Booker

It is very easy to play along:

• Grab your current read and open to a random page

• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS!

• Share the title & author, too, so that other participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Here are my teasers this month:

“Whether or not anyone likes me—whether or not I like me—I don’t want to blame myself anymore. I only wanted to belong. I wanted so badly to be taken in—by someone, someplace. Anyone. Anyplace. I wanted it enough to screw up and lose myself, but I am still not to blame...I didn’t deserve this.”

I Stop Somewhere by T.E. Carter

Genre: Teen/YA

Published by Simon & Schuster Ltd (19th April, 2018)

Pages: 320

Trigger Warning: Rape and violent content contained and as a result of the authenticity and raw style of writing may be one to be cautious about reading particularly for anyone with very recent experience of rape.

Description:
“When the world breaks you into pieces, sometimes you find what’s left scattered among other people’s broken parts.”

Ellie Frias has never wanted to be popular, she just wants to blend in, to be accepted. But then Caleb Breward, tells her she’s beautiful and makes her believe it.

Ellie loves Caleb, but sometimes she’s not sure she likes him that much – his awkward smile, the possessive way he touches her, his harsh tone, how he ignores her one minute and can't get enough the next. And then, on one black night, Ellie discovers the monster her boyfriend really is.

The Lovely Bones meets Asking For It - this is the searing, heartbreaking story of a lost teenager, and the town she leaves behind.

My Thoughts:
I’m not going to say very much about it here. I’m almost done reading it and want to save it for my review which will be added very soon. In the meantime here are some notes I made at various stages of reading:

March 18, 2018
40.0% "I remember the rape and murder of a young girl in my town where a school has been built on the wasteland where her body was found and the poignancy of this line is heartbreaking. ‘He’ll bring his friends home and they’ll play soccer over where I am.’

“This is teen/YA that demands to be read by all ages."

March 18, 2018
43.0% "This is so incredibly powerful and so obviously written with personal experience of from either the author or someone close. I feel devastated and on the verge of howling with sheer disgust and devastation. I feel wrung emotionally and want to cry so much for Ellie and what she has gone through"

Tuesday, 13 March 2018

TEASER TUESDAY: Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by

The Purple Booker

It is very easy to play along:

• Grab your current read and open to a random page

• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS!

• Share the title & author, too, so that other participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Here are my teasers this month:

“An army post in peacetime is a dull place. Things happen, but then they happen over and over again.

There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed. The participants of this tragedy were: two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse.”

Reflections in a Golden Eye Carson McCullers

Genre: Novella, Literary Fiction

Published by Penguin Modern Classics

Pages: 128

Description:
'A masterpiece . . . as mature and finished as Henry James's The Turn of the Screw'.

Time Set on a Southern army base in the 1930s, Reflections in a Golden Eye tells the story of Captain Penderton, a bisexual whose life is upset by the arrival of Major Langdon, a charming womanizer who has an affair with Penderton's tempestuous and flirtatious wife, Leonora.

Upon the novel's publication in 1941, reviewers were unsure of what to make of its relatively scandalous subject matter. But a critic for Time magazine wrote, "In almost any hands, such material would yield a rank fruitcake of mere arty melodrama. But Carson McCullers tells her tale with simplicity, insight, and a rare gift of phrase."
Written during a time when McCullers's own marriage to Reeves was on the brink of collapse

My Thoughts:
After hearing McCullers novella being discussed amongst the guest writers Nina Stibbe (Love, Nina; Paradise Lodge) and Kit de Waal (My Name is Leon; The Trick to Time) on this afternoon’s BBC Radio 4 program, (‘A Good Read’), I had an overwhelming urge to hunt amongst my hoard of books to find it, and having just started reading, I’m rather eager to get on with it.

So that’s it for this week. Will say more about soon.

Tuesday, 6 March 2018

TEASER TUESDAY: The Lost Flower's of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by

The Purple Booker

It is very easy to play along:

• Grab your current read and open to a random page

• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS!

• Share the title & author, too, so that other participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Here are my teasers this month:

“Some days Alice’s mother disappeared from her body altogether. There were no stories or walks to the sea. There was no talking with flowers. Her mother would stay in bed with the curtains drawn against the blanching light, vanished, as if her soul had gone somewhere else entirely.”

The Lost Flower's of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland

Published by Pan Macmillan (28th June 2018)

Pages: 400

Description
Flowers, fire and fairy tales are the elements that will forever shape nine-year-old Alice Hart's life, in The Lost Flower's of Alice Hart, the remarkable debut by Holly Ringland.
Alice Hart lives in isolation by the sea, where her mother’s enchanting flowers and their hidden messages shelter her from the dark moods of her father. When tragedy changes her life irrevocably, nine-year-old Alice goes to live with the grandmother she never knew existed, on a native flower farm that gives refuge to women who, like Alice, are lost or broken. In the Victorian tradition, every flower has a meaning and, as she settles into her new life, Alice uses this language of flowers to say the things that are too hard to speak.
As she grows older, though, family secrecy, a devastating betrayal and a man who’s not all he seems, combine to make Alice realise there are some stories that flowers alone cannot tell. If she is to have the freedom she craves, she must find the courage to possess the most powerful story she knows: her own.

My Thoughts at 30%
Enchanting, dreamy, mesmerising…I love this book. ‘The Lost Flower's of Alice Hart’ has introduced me to the magical language of flowers and is an absorbing heartfelt tale about grief, abandonment, loss and betrayal and about how with the love and nurturing of others any hurt can be healed, and that with time anything can be overcome.

For me this book does for flowers what Elizabeth J Church’s ‘The Atomic Weight of Love’ did for crows. Deep sigh !

Review to follow on completion.